


Mistakes

by Monocytogenes



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Implied Relationships, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Physical Abuse, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-02-02
Packaged: 2018-03-10 05:00:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3277649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monocytogenes/pseuds/Monocytogenes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He is a fool to let her in, knowing that she will continually make the same mistakes." </p>
<p>When Harley is on the outs with Joker, she goes to Crane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mistakes

He is a fool to let her in.   
  
This is how it always goes—Harleen showing up on his doorstep, shivering in torn and bloodied clothes, with black-and-blue cheeks and smeared lipstick. She always manages to find him, regardless of what odd corner of Gotham he happens to be renting, and she describes the long chain of inquiries that got her there in order to quell his own paranoia. He’s the one she has to see, one of the few men she feels she can trust, and when her mouth twists into a grin around chipped teeth he feels compelled to let her in.   
  
He gives the same lectures each time as he patches up her wounds, talking about the cycle of abuse and learned helplessness, and she nods and wallows in self-deprecation. She’s an idiot, a screw-up, and she won’t be won over so easily this time, not after all of this. She wipes her running mascara and blows her nose into toilet paper and he tries to ignore the twinge in the pit of his stomach as he listens to her cry. He and she both know what, a few days or weeks or months later, all her resolutions will come to.   
  
He serves her whatever he has on hand—usually black tea, sweetened with cheap sugar and nearly-expired milk. She comments on his living arrangements, the piles of books, the secondhand rugs. Sometimes he lacks a couch, and they’re relegated to folding chairs. Sometimes they have nothing better than the floor.   
  
Sometimes, as the night drags on and the sirens blare outside the windows, he recounts the latest research to her. He watches the gleam in her eyes, the old passion as they talk about disorders and therapies, and listens to her diction shift from childish phrases to their shared professional language. It fills him with nostalgia, memories of patients swimming to mind, and in a masochistic way he revisits thoughts of a life that he knows is behind him, behind both of them. She allows him the opportunity to indulge in loss.   
  
He isn’t sure, anymore, what it is that he wants. He is a fool to let her in, because she inevitably ends up stripped to her undergarments and gushing tearfully about what a good friend—friend?—he is, and he inevitably ends up with his hands against her pockmarked skin. When she rises on her toes to kiss him the split ends of her hair brush against his jaw, and he protests because there is only one way that this will end, in days and weeks and months. She doesn’t listen to him.   
  
Once, he dares to slap her, inflicting a bruise atop bruises. She stands there, teeters for a moment or two with her neck twisted, and then reaches for him again. As he pushes her down her lips press hard against his, nails digging into his nape and spine, and he thinks that he could strangle her, choke the consciousness from her in all his rage over what he cannot have. He watches the fear contort her face, and as she struggles for breath he kisses back.   
  
Loss is a luxury that he could bury himself in, one he is unable to afford. As she cooks for him the following morning, clad in one of his shirts and pajama pants that pool around her ankles, he reflects on the inevitable. His own bruises are well-hidden beneath his clothes, still healing after sprints down fire escapes and leaps over fences, and he feels as patched as the mask that is too often his only solace, pieces bound together by clumsy stitches. He cannot risk any of those threads tearing free, not after she returns to the disaster that is her life.   
  
He is a fool to let her in, knowing that she will continually make the same mistakes.   
  
It seems he will, too.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Mistakes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3390485) by [derivational (crookedspoon)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedspoon/pseuds/derivational)




End file.
